by Tamuira Reid
Mary hears voices. Voices that awaken her from a deep, dark sleep. Voices that pull and laugh and tug. Voices that make her lock and unlock doors. Wash clean dishes. Fold and unfold clothes. Voices that make her tired.
There's an orange one. A tan one. A red one. A handful of white ones. She knows them by heart. Their purposes. Their functions. Her dysfunction. Standing over the kitchen counter-top, underwear but no bra, she faces the breakfast of pills staring back at her, a little army of soldiers going off to war.
There's a three-year-old somewhere in the back of the house, knee-deep in a pile of dirty clothes and linen, searching for his dinosaur, Pickles, who he'll flush down the toilet, because not only is he missing a leg, but a tail too. His daily routine consists mostly of flushing stuff down the toilet and hiding things from his mom. Car keys are buried in the soil of houseplants. Lipstick goes under a mattress (only after it is noted that “Rock Star Red” looks as good on his forehead as it does on the wall). Photo albums are dismantled, displayed, black and white pictures colored-in with a half-broken crayon. Baby dolls dismembered. Credit cards and day planners and unbalanced checkbooks stashed inside a toy box, under a bathroom sink, in the exhaust pipe of a life-sized motorcycle.
The voices make mornings hard.
Scrambled eggs take an hour to cook, shaking hands pick out bits of shell, burnt toast going unnoticed until the wail of a smoke alarm cuts into her consciousness.
She's making the day's “To Do” list, a mental log of errands to run, phone calls to make, appointments she won't keep. Her back and arms ache, the dark circles around her eyes intensifying, making her look old. L'Oreal concealer is added to the list of “Things To Buy”, and she massages the circles with the tips of her fingers, trying to rub the age out.
The boy wants cheese.
“No cheese for breakfast.”
“But I wancheeze mama! Cheeze! Cheeze! Cheeze!”
She plugs in the old Hoover, the one she bought at the flea market last year, while he triumphantly bites into a block of cheddar, legs stretched out in front of him, sitting intently on the cold morning linoleum. Mama's cleaning things again.
The voices make living difficult.
Long nights of drinking take a toll on the house. Empty bottles crowd coffee and end tables, tipping over forgotten ashtrays and discarded cups of soda, smashed butts and brown liquid falling to the floor. She'll later wrap these wine bottles in tissue paper and give them as Christmas presents to her family and friends, erasing any doubt there'd been about the status of her drinking. I'll quickly stuff a tapered candle into mine, Look – It makes a great candleholder. After dessert I'll offer to drive Mary home only to detour at the corner bar, a dank, smoky room and I won't think twice about buying her a beer, and I won't think twice about buying her another one and I won't think, just don't think about it, that this is wrong, that there is something inherently terrible about watching her drink. Because this is what friends do. This is normal.
They whisper.
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